Q & A Saturday – Can I Sell a House with a Bad Roof?

Welcome to our Q & A Saturday video.

In these Q & A Videos we will answer your questions about real estate. Any real estate related topic from questions about selling your house, buying a house, real estate investor questions, land lording questions, local market questions and many others things are all fair game.

Today’s question is “Can I Sell a House with a Bad Roof?“

In this video Shaun talks about some of the issues that come up when trying to sell a house that has roof problems.

Some of the main points covered in this video are:

1) Different levels of damage

2) What things really must be fixed

3) FHA financing issues

4) Other possible financing issues

5) Homeowners insurance

A roof is one of the basic building blocks of any house. Luckily they are a resilient part and usually last a very long time. However the life or a roof is not infinite and when an issue does come about it is one of the most important things to fix quickly. A leaking roof can allow significant water penetration resulting in significant water damage in many different forms to other parts of the house as well. The biggest issue of trying to sell a house with an old and/or damaged roof is push back from buyers. A roof that is visibly in disrepair, even if there are no detectable leaks, will be a turn off both aesthetically as well as in terms of planning for future costs of owning the property. Just having an old roof that appears to still be in good shape might come up in negotiations but is much less of an issue.

The biggest issue will come if there are big problems with the roof. If there are bare spots with missing shingles, active leaks or something as bad as actual visible holes in the roof there also may be issues around buyers getting financing and home owners insurance. These will alwaysbe issues with FHA or VA type financing and if it is that bad conventional lenders will often not authorize the loan until the issues have been fixed. While not as cut and dry as some other issues we have talked about in the past (LikeOld Electrical, Broken HVAC system, Failed Septic System… etc.) financing issues can definitely come up with a very bad roof.

Hope you enjoyed the video and leave any other questions you have about the topic below or any other topics you would like to see covered in future videos. I encourage anyone that has things they would like to talk about to let me know what they are. You can always fill out a contact us form here and put Q & A in the subject, just leave a comment with your questions below here, send an email to info@masshomesale.com, or post it on our Facebook page or Twitter account.